


Small Sanctuaries

by deadsymbolism



Category: Being Human, Being Human (UK)
Genre: Gen, Post-Series, post-series 5, the finale killed me
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-14
Updated: 2013-03-14
Packaged: 2017-12-05 08:13:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,203
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/720833
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deadsymbolism/pseuds/deadsymbolism
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"It's certainly not an end."</p><p>A gen post-series-finale fic set in three different universes of the three prevailing theories about the ending: the dream, the afterlife, and true humanity.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Small Sanctuaries

_"Come, my friends, 'tis not too late to seek a newer world."_

_\--Lord Alfred Tennyson, "Ulysses"_

 

_I. The Dream_

They’re alive and they’re human and against all odds they are _happy_. Still, though, Tom can’t hold the fear in anymore and tells them about Hatch and his little paper wolf and the dream world with a home and pregnant Allison. A little paper wolf is also sitting right above the fireplace, and Tom gets this sick feeling in his stomach when he thinks too hard about it. So he explains it to them one night when he can’t stand it, trying to stop his tears, and no one says anything for a minute.

“What if we didn’t make it out? What if…what if we lost?” His eyes scald with the effort of not crying.

“We did the ritual. We killed him. It’s over.” Alex’s tone is firm. There’s not even a core of fear behind it.

Hal speaks softly. “Tom, whatever the wolf means…it’s beyond us now. We can’t ever know for certain. But we do know that you don’t turn into a monster on the full moon, that Alex can feel and taste, and that I don’t crave blood any more. That’s enough, surely?”

Tom doesn’t answer but he nods and wipes the tears away. Maybe it is.

The world certainly _seems_ solid. They can leave the house, they can go to shops and pubs and beaches and cook meals for everyone and Alex can kiss Hal (a lot) and Tom has even called and spoken to Allison. She’s coming down to visit them for a week next month, during her break at uni. When he thinks about it, he can’t even contain the grin.

So he finds that it is enough. It has to be.

If there is another world outside this small sanctuary where pestilence and famine and war and endless death reign, where the restart button has been effectively pushed on the human species, they can’t know.

Nothing lasts forever, after all. Some tides can’t be held back, whether they were to rush in now or in billions of years with a dead cold universe.

It’s like that old conundrum about a tree falling in the forest—if the world ends and there’s no humans left to mourn that passing, how much of a tragedy is it? Does the apocalypse make a sound when no one is left to hear it?

Maybe it’s enough that a crumb of happiness was found somewhere, in an unreal world that felt real enough. The important isn’t always the real.

 

_II. The Afterlife_

They are alive and they’re human and against all odds they are _happy_. The first few weeks, Alex wheedles Hal into making four course meals every night. There’s never any leftovers. She lies in the sun in the back garden even on cool Welsh spring days and just lets herself feel it. She drinks crappy beer with Tom and talks about football. She and Hal kiss all the time, just because they want to and they can. This is life, she thinks, and it’s good.

The origami wolf on the mantel hasn’t escaped her notice. She’s not sure how it got there. When she thinks about it, she feels this low and dormant sort of knowing in her stomach.

At dinner, one night, she brings it up. Hal is puzzled, and Tom looks anxious. He puts down his fork and looks at his plate and tells them what Hatch offered, where he first saw the thing.

“I don’t know what it means, but…it don’t _feel_ bad, if that makes sense,” He finishes. Finally he looks up at them again.

Alex nods. “I know what you mean. I look at it and it’s like…I think it’s important but it’s…it’s _not_ at the same time. It doesn’t scare me. Maybe it should, but it doesn’t.” She shrugs and looks at Hal.

Hal’s brow is furrowed. “We can’t begin to fathom what has happened here—how this happened. I don’t think that it is out of the realm of possibility that we were left a…reminder by something.”

“A reminder of what?” She asks.

“That we made it,” Tom says before Hal can answer.

Hal just smiles gently. “Yes, I think so. How or why, we don’t know. But in every sense that matters, I suppose, we made it.”

When she curls up next to Hal that night, naked and sated, she dreams of a long corridor. It’s nothing like what she’s seen before, what she came to fear. It’s cheery and brightly lit, no men with sticks and rope come for her, and after she wanders past a few doors, one of them opens.

A smiling Annie is there, with two cups of tea in her hands. In the dream, Alex follows her in and says “I have so much to tell you,” with tears in her eyes and Annie grins and nods and says through her own tears, “I know.”

They talk for hours. It’s just the two of them, but Annie talks about her new life—of sorts-- with Mitchell and George and Nina and Eve, who took her first steps last week.

“I still don’t really think I understand,” Alex says, draining her fifth cup of excellent tea. “Things happen in your afterlife. They change, I mean. It’s not some sort of endless, fixed heaven.”

Annie grins. “God, would it really be an ideal afterlife if it was?”

The question stirs something inside Alex. It’s a vague notion that’s been nagging at her for some time, but she’s never been able to articulate it. It’s like the same sort of knowing she gets when she sees the paper wolf.

“Annie,” she says, feeling like she’s on the brink of something, “Am I…are Hal and Tom and I…”

Annie just keeps smiling and puts her hand on Alex’s, and then Alex wakes up.

She doesn’t tell Hal or Tom about the dream. It seemed so vivid, but now she can’t really remember the details, just that there was Annie and happiness and something important.

She walks down to the sea days later, alone. She feels the sun on her skin and smells the ocean and listens to the cry of the gulls. This is important, too. This could be forever. When she thinks about it, she wouldn’t mind. But she also realizes she’s got a much more relative perspective of things, now.

Death no longer seems like such finality. It’s certainly not an end.

 

_III. Human_

They are alive and they’re human and against all odds they are _happy_. The feeling is so alien to Hal that he sometimes finds himself stopping in the middle of a mundane task to wonder at it. He sometimes thinks he has no right to it. He tells this to Alex one night as they lie together in bed, limbs tangled in the sheets.

“Well, then,” she says gently, “maybe you’ve got to earn it.”

He kisses her again and the rest of the night is lost to things other than conversation.

Tom gets them a job in a bookstore, of all places. He is a natural at ease with the customers like he was at the café and the hotel, and Hal finds he learns from him every day. Hal is better at knowing literature and he finds he has a knack for matching works to customers. He gives _Jane Eyre_ to a mousy teenage girl who can barely look him in the eye but comes back three days later to tell him with no reservations how much she loved it. He directs a bored and sulking young man to _The Brothers Karamazov_ and sees his eyes light up with interest. He finds rare editions for local professors and Romantic poetry for old men and marvels at how humanity reaches out to one another. He is a part of this now.

Hal comes home every night and watches “Antiques Roadshow” with the two people he loves most in this world. He listens to Alex play the piano and Tom gush about Allison and he cooks all of them dinners and shaves with a mirror. The constant and unrelenting hunger is gone.

It’s still hard, sometimes, to not be overwhelmed with everything. The guilt takes a different form now, but it’s still there. He gets angry at customers who are rude to Tom or men who leer at Alex and the knowledge is always there that he is capable of killing them, fangs or none.

Perhaps most unsettling is the knowledge that one day it will all be over, that death will come for him too.

When a year passes, and Hal realizes he genuinely feels _older_ and not just _old_ , he places two tickets on the breakfast table in front of Alex. She looks up questioningly at him and then studies the papers. Her little delighted and disbelieving laugh makes his heart feels like he’s going to burst.

The train from Cardiff to London is picturesque, but they barely notice it. When they get on the Eurostar, Alex’s grin is irrepressible. They arrive in Paris just at dusk.

The city is so different from what Hal remembers when they take a taxi from Gare du Nord to their hotel in the Marais, but it doesn’t matter. He is re-learning things. They walk down medieval streets hand in hand and eat delicious meals Hal orders for them in cafés and they kiss in front of the Eiffel Tower like every other tourist. Tom and Allison, home from university and taking advantage of the empty house, call to ask them how it’s going and Hal can’t even begin to explain.

When they get back five days later, he can’t believe how glad he is to be back in Barry, in the B&B with the hideous décor. One of the things he is re-learning is what it’s like to have a home. It’s wonderful, he decides.

The four of them sit together that night and talk into the early hours. Tom and Allison finally go upstairs around two and Alex is falling asleep on his shoulder.

He looks at the mantel, and the little paper wolf. He remembers the first day after…after everything.

The shock was almost too much, so Tom said maybe they should start by sitting down and figuring stuff out. They had shared with one another what Hatch had offered them. It was an intensely difficult thing for each, he suspected, but especially for himself.

It was Alex who suggested they do something to remember everything. Not that they’d be likely forget, she explained, but that maybe there are some things you’ve got to memorialize properly.

Tom had done the majority of the work, really. He had known Mitchell and George and Nina. He found Mitchell’s gloves, and George’s Star of David and Nina’s ultrasound of Eve. Hal had suggested Annie’s tea cup, and gingerly put in place the pad with Alex’s phone number on it. She had set his domino there, and Tom’s carved wolf. It was both a memorial and a farewell, of sorts.

When they had finished, they’d stared at it in silence.

“It’s missing somethin’,” Tom spoke first. He looked at it again, for a moment. “Hal,” he said, with just a touch of hesitation, “you can do that origami thing, righ’?”

Hal looked at him, almost startled. “Yes. Reasonably well.”

“I think that…maybe we need to put a reminder there of what we were willin’ to give up. So we can remember what to work for, yeah?”

Alex and Hal had looked at each other, surprised. Then Hal had turned toward Tom again and nodded. “That’s quite a good idea, actually. Did you have something in mind?”

Tom’s voice was quiet. “In my dreamy thingy, Hatch had made this wolf out of paper and he set it up there. Can you make one a’ those?”

“I’ve never tried that particular pattern,” Hal replied. “But I can certainly learn.” And he had, making several until he made one just right. He had handed the finished product to Tom, who placed it with a sense of ceremony and gravity.  

Hal stares at the origami figurine now, and thinks about what he gave up. It had been nothing at all compared to what he gained, but he could never have known until he made the sacrifice.

That, he rather suspects, was the whole point.

He strokes Alex’s hair and listens to her soft breathing, to Tom speaking to Allison upstairs. It is extraordinary for him to think that one day, this will be gone.

It will be gone, and that is why it is so fiercely precious. He will no longer watch it happening with helplessness, outside of the process, but will be a part of that change—the indefatigable march onward that every human makes. They are making it now, with every second. There is no cheating it, but he’s lived too long to think of it as a clean and absolute ending, either.

When death comes now, it will just be a satisfied smile and the closing of a door.

 

**Author's Note:**

> -I was emotionally destroyed by the finale and am writing fic to make myself feel better. This is shameless self-comfort. I personally subscribe against my emotional will to the theory that they died completing the ritual and are in an afterlife, living as humans, but I wanted to explore what each world might be like.  
> -Oh, look, another Tennyson quote to introduce this.


End file.
